


Alofa

by afterandalasia



Category: Moana (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Universe, Chocolate Box Exchange 2017, Coda, F/F, Goddesses, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 02:56:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9300995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: When the time was right, they always said, her soulmark would appear.By the time that it does, Moana was no longer thinking of it. And when it appears, she is not sure what to think at all.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phidari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phidari/gifts).



> Happy Chocolate Box, phidari! I fell hard for your prompts, and I hope that you get the fics of your dreams today.
> 
> "Alofa" is the Samoan word for "love".

When the time was right, they always said, her soulmark would appear. The first time that two compatible people meet, once they are both past puberty, the soulmark would appear in a shimmer of light and darken to deep brown on her skin, indicating that the gods had found a match for her. Motunui was small, and it was unheard of for more than one couple to gain their soulmark on the same day; finding her match would be easy.

That was what they had always said. But puberty came and went, and no matter how Moana craned her neck to peer at her back, or had her mother or grandmother check those parts of her that she could not see, years passed without her soulmark being seen. Gramma Tala even patiently went over her scalp, parting the hair in narrow rows, to be sure that it had not hidden itself away there.

She reached sixteen. Either her potential soulmates were still children, or she was one of those people - not common, but not unknown - who would never have a soulmark. Usually, it was not that shocking; they would often choose to marry a widow or widower, if they married at all. But never before had the future Chief been left without the soulmark that the gods bestowed upon their people.

Without her soulmark, she had no right to bear tattoos. It rankled more than she expected, to see boys and girls younger than her proudly getting tattooed across their arms, their back, their chests. The best-designed tattoos made the soulmark seem to be a natural part of them, until with a touch as simple as fingers to fingers two soulmates could make their tattoos glow with the light of their magic again.

The yearning in her chest, aching for the sea, only grew worse when she thought of her bare skin. What if there was someone suitable, but they were on a far-off island? She would bear it, bear loneliness if need be, but if it could happen to her then it could happen to her people as well. Some whispered that the gods did not favour her, Moana knew that, but she thought of it as just another sign that the people of Motonui were  _ meant _ to see beyond the horizon.

Of course, her own skin was the last thing that she was thinking of when the darkness came creeping to Motunui. She set her eyes on the horizon, on the light, and with her grandmother’s words still whispering in her ears she turned the prow of the boat to the stars.

  
  
  
  
  


Sailing was more incredible than she could ever have imagined, and more harrowing than she could ever have feared. She fought and fled and sobbed and shouted her delight to the uncountable stars, and when Te Fiti was whole again it was as if the world was whole again.

Even as she sailed home, there was a warmth in her heart and a smile on her lips, and she laughed when Maui turned from hawk to shark to plunge down into the sea and race her across the waves. He always won, of course, but the  _ race _ was the whole point of it.

There was still an ache, coming home without her grandmother on the beach to meet her, but she still knew. Moana was sure of it. She held her parents tightly, and felt them all but clinging in return, felt their unspoken fear that they had lost her as well.

It was only once the first flurry of activity was over, and she was ready to tell her story, that she had Maui join them and take his human form again. However stoically he tried to play it, she could see how much he loved the attention, even if she did have to threaten to take his hook before he was anything like helpful in telling the tale at all.

Afterwards, in the comparative quiet of home, Maui delighted her father with his joy at the mere sight of coconuts, and Tui gave Moana a playful, knowing look. She grinned back, knowing exactly what he meant.

Only later, as she was finally able to change her clothes, did she catch sight of the mark on her left breast. A tattoo-dark spiral, perhaps two inches by one, sat right over her heart. Frowning, Moana licked her thumb and attempted to rub it away, but when she did so a blue light glimmered in its depths.

Her knees buckled as realisation dawned.

_ A soulmark. _

She stuck her head out between two of the tapa, holding them together in front of her bare chest. “Maui,” she hissed. He had been outside just moments before, admiring their garden, and surely could not be that far away. “ _ Maui _ .”

“Hey, hey, what’s up?” He appeared from around the side of the house, hook dangling securely from his belt, and looked her up and down. Quite aware that her appearance was not exactly dignified, Moana did her best to look even vaguely in control of the situation. “Are… you okay there?”

She took a deep breath. “Maui, I think my soulmark has appeared.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “Uh… congratulations?”

Moana glared.

“What? What am I supposed to say?”

His voice had started to rise, and she hushed him frantically before glancing over her shoulder to where her parents were still at the far end of the house. They were beside the fire, their backs to her, but she knew that they were not fools and would notice her overly-frantic conversation were she not careful.

Her heart was pounding in her chest, but it was probably just her imagination that she could feel the soulmark throbbing above it. “The new tattoo,” she said, with a nod to his shoulders. He looked at her blankly. “On your back. The one of  _ me _ .”

“What?” Maui’s eyes went wide as he realised, then he backed up, raising both hands. “Oh, nonono. Firstly, that’s not how my tattoos work. Secondly, it only appeared  _ after  _ you gave Te Fiti her heart back. And unless you suddenly hit puberty yesterday,” he pointed off with one thumb, “then we met before that.”

“What? Am I that bad an option?” she retorted. A strange mixture of relief and confusion washed over her as she realised the sense in his words, though. If she had any connection to Maui, it would have shown as soon as she landed on his island. She had seen the skin of her chest while putting on those absurd gaudy decorations to distracted Tamatoa, and even in the heat of that moment would have spotted something as important as a soulmark. Looking up at the sky, Moana took a deep breath, then it hit her like a blow and she looked back at Maui again. “Wait. Of  _ course  _ it’s not you. It’s Te Fiti.”

She should have recognised the spiral. Perhaps it was its very simplicity that had made it so difficult to place, though; spirals were a part of the world, from shells on the beach to leaves on trees.

“What?” said Maui.

Ignoring him, Moana drew back into the house, still holding the tapa closed, then remembered her manners and stuck her head out again. “Thank you,” she blurted, and drew back.

It only took a beat.

One more time, she looked out, warningly. “And don’t you dare.”

She heard Maui’s snort as she withdrew again; they both knew that he did not even have to say it. Grimacing, Moana straightened out the tapa where she had been gripping them harder than she meant to, then quickly dressed again and rejoined her parents.

It was not the time, not tonight. She had not been able to think about it properly herself yet, and she knew that they were still overjoyed to have her back and taking in everything that had happened to save the island. Maui’s descriptions of the danger had been a little too graphic for Moana’s liking at times, and she had seen her father looking a little pale. To announce that her soulmate was, well, a  _ goddess _ would probably not be the best way to finish her first night back.

But she could not help glancing at her bare arms and feeling a flicker of excitement at the thought of finally having tattoos reaching down them. Of her skin finally being hers, as surely as the gods’, and of being able to tell the world that she knows just where her heart is.

  
  
  
  
  


When she sailed again, the beginning of tattoos were on her chest, curling down towards her stomach and just starting to stretch up towards her shoulder. Each fragment of ink had been a point of pain, but a thrill as well, like a step deeper into finding who she was. And whenever she breathed deep and caught the faint smell of the sea, she knew who and where she was.

Her people were quick learners, even if she was not quite sure how much of a teacher she made. They took to the sea like coming home, and she knew that was exactly why they did so well. It called to the salt in her blood.

But she did not take them to Te Fiti. Not without the goddess’s say, at least, and Moana was not quite sure how to go about that. So it meant finding an island where people were content to stay for a short while, exploring and restocking and mending the boats, while she sailed back along lines in the sky that were more like instinct than thought.

It was late morning, the sun still rising, when she returned. The lush green of the island rising from the sea made her smile until she thought that her cheeks would ache, and when her boat came to a rest on the lulling shore it felt like a whole new sort of home. As soon as Moana set foot on the beach, she felt the warmth that spread through her chest, and only had to glance beneath her top to confirm that the soulmark was glimmering blue-white on her skin.

“Sorry for the wait,” she said. It might have been her imagination that there was a ripple of laughter in the sound of the wind going through the leaves, but then again a couple of years was probably nothing to a goddess. “I had to take care of my people.”

Now that, she knew a goddess would understand.

She was not sure how this was supposed to work. A human soulmate, she would be expected to spend her life with, raise her children with. But what she was supposed to do beside a goddess, a very force of the land and sea itself, she had no idea.

She sat in the cool shade of one of the coconut trees, and watched the shining light making fractal patterns on the waves. The whole  _ unknown-ness _ of it did not frighten her; more, she found it fascinating, perhaps even enough to set a flutter of excitement in her chest at the thought of broaching another horizon, finding another, less physical, land.

For a while, she simply sat in the silence, then as it became too weighty began to talk about where she and her people had travelled, the new islands and new plants and birds they had discovered. The horizon never ended, simply offered up new lives to be lived. The sea was boundless and endless, and although Moana knew that some people took comfort in the idea of a finite world she was not one of them. 

Before she knew it, she was describing moments as if they might somehow amuse Te Fiti, of one of her people getting stuck in a tree because his pride was too much to accept help down, or of when she herself had rolled over in her sleep and fell off the boat to an abrupt awakening. The Ocean might have deposited her back on the ship again, but there was nothing it could do about the seawater up her nose or the fact that she had then needed to explain all about the Ocean to her crew.

It felt so natural, talking to Te Fiti; the silence did not seem threatening but welcoming. She spoke as Moana, not as the Chief or the wayfarer of her people, and it felt like a weight off her shoulders just to be able to say the words. Before she knew it, her muscles had melted into relaxation, and she was dozing in the comfortable warmth and rich green-smelling air.

She dreamed of lands rising up from the sea, of the gasping feeling of entering the air for the first time and the strange brilliant sensation of first meeting the sun. She dreamed of the darkness spreading, sickening and warping her, the gaping bloodless wound in her chest like a choking pain - and then the incredible freedom as it was healed, the world righting itself and a millennium of pain washed away by the brightness of love and life rushing through her. Somehow the lack of pain became itself a glory, and she knew that every second of every long year she would know the radiant glory of being alive

Moana’s eyes opened to the shade of trees across a blue-purple sky. She could still feel the island beneath her skin, the roots that reached down to the ocean floor and the mountains that brushed the sky, and when she gasped for breath it felt strange to have human lungs.

Her hand had tightened, fingers digging into the earth, and she could smell the bruised leaves.

There were stories of soulmates whose minds could come together. But they were rare, rarer than having no potential soulmate at all, and had become their own legends. A woman who found her shipwrecked soulmate in the midst of the raging seas, because she could hear his love for her across the waves. Two men who were unbested in battle, because without a word they knew where each other’s spears would be and never failed each other. Moana had not been interested in those stories; Maui’s feats and tricks had always been far more interesting to her. Perhaps she should have paid more attention.

She looked to the ground, as if she might see Te Fiti there. “Is it that strange to you?” she murmured. She could still feel the shadows of an island in her skin; perhaps, just for a moment, Te Fiti had felt what it was like to be human.

There was a swell of warmth in her chest;  _ yes _ was simple enough to understand. But then again, Te Fiti had made herself well enough understood without ever using words.

Moana closed her eyes, and lay her head back, and felt what it was to be a goddess. And she knew, as sure as the heartbeat in her chest was something new and strange to her, that Te Fiti lived in her as well.


End file.
